Bereft: Foretold

46 | A Sin's Return

I would always remember the taste of that first breath.

Mortals exist with limited senses. They smell and taste and hear only what is immediate, and they can't sense the essence of a place, the memories that grant a location a unique, distinguishing flavor. Humans walked into an abandoned prison and saw the bars, the decay—but when I walked into the same prison, I tasted the anger, the fear, the desperation. I relived the sorrow of a man locked too long in the dark, forgetting the touch of the rain or the feel of the sun. I saw the fights, the uprisings, the brutality, and the cruelty. 

Where humans only saw a rock, I saw what began an nation. 

My first inhalation brought the immediate taste of chalk and dirt to my tongue, but beyond that waited the memories of a thousand different mages who'd once walked this hall, a thousand different men all claiming brotherhood beneath a single banner raised in the spirit of revolution. The scent of their blood magic was a permanent stain upon this place's history.

Then I could taste the terror, the pain, and I knew the manor was not the same as I had left it.

Hunger assaulted my middle as agony tore into my leg. My features struggled between human and Absolian, teeth like tiny javelins against the inside of my lips, my eyes opening to nothing but darkness. I was under the roof, or a section of it at least, and my body was trapped below a steel beam, a near literal ton of debris, and part of a wall. Breathing in disintegrated insulation and concrete dust, I forced my energy toward my busted arm and waited. 

It healed. The convalescence was sluggish and unfamiliar, but I'd done it. I'd healed my arm. I was myself again.

Then the hunger came, an inevitable sledgehammer to my middle that'd gone too long without attention. The Seat of Pride didn't have energy, and my soul was newly reformed, stripped of the mortal mana that had infused it and was now left as vulnerable as new skin in direct sunlight. My soul felt swollen in a way I couldn't identify, warmer than it should have been, but I paid it little attention. I was famished. 

My left leg was crushed under the end of the beam, and I used my arms to lift—cursing and swearing incessantly as my limbs became reacquainted with my original strength. Mortal muscles and ligaments burned as otherworldly energy reknit my nerves and reoriented my senses. Breath held, I kicked with my good leg, and threw the roof off myself.

Emerging into the foyer once more, I sucked dusty air into my lungs and coughed, my limbs struck with an unpleasant, needling sensation as crushed bone and torn flesh fused. My fingers curled into the roof's edge as I lifted myself upright, fingertips leaving depressions in the shingles, and I finally saw what had gone so wrong.

I should have known Aurelius wouldn't be kept at bay for long.

My Absolian brother—spotless in spite of the unsettled haze of grime lingering in the room—was threatening the witches, looming above the cornered women with his wings spread wide for dramatic effect. Stavros was on the ground with a hand over her face, as if Aurelius had struck her, and Saule was crouched over Sara and Voronin.

Sara wasn't moving.

Mages littered the anterior of the room, either unconscious or dead, I didn't know. There was one boy standing on weakening legs with a rippling distortion between himself and Aurelius. Cage was on the ground as well with blood on his face, but the old mage caught my eye and grinned.

Aurelius turned to see me stand. His brow lowered and pulled at the perfect alignment of his otherworldly features. "You. You have the most peculiar habit of appearing wherever I go in this realm. You are a strange phantom."

I kept my eyes off of the witches and off of Cage, who was quickly scribbling runes upon the floor in his own blood. "You're either going home or into the ground, brother."